Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Leaderboard

Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 11/24/22 in all areas

  1. I wonder how a proper Objectivist would report on the data, but I propose the following: It would be 100% fact based, no shred of anything for a. personal financial gain b. political gain c. institutional or political reputation or d. with the intent to cajole or persuade people to any so called desired behavior i.e. no social engineering of sentiment or action of any kind. It would look at medical interactions in society from the individual's perspective, and individual rights, the individual's freedom, health, and very lives. This is in many senses opposite to the so-called "public good" of public health approaches. I.e. the data would be looked at in the sense of treating individuals, how individual people fared, their health, their freedoms, their mental well being etc. not merely the so-called health of a collective... using who knows what as statistical standards. A herd which is "treated" and "managed" be said to be more healthy, even when enslaved, or if part of the heard are disadvantaged or sacrificed (culled) for the sake of the collective whole. Herd mentality is not how an Objectivist would think of it or deal with it. Sacrifice of the innocent for NO MATTER HOW MANY other individuals IS EVIL. Lives saved? I wonder if anyone has done the analysis thusly: How many people under the age of 50, how many CHILDREN would have died or suffered irreparably educationally, physically, mentally, had nothing been done, no vaccines, no imprisonment, no mandates, no muzzling. Then how many were affected because of the measures taken. Then doing the same for people over the age of 50, no measures... versus measures taken. I wonder whether in the end, in the pursuit of sheer numbers of "survivors", many of the young with their whole lives ahead of them have been brought low and in some cases died for no good reason. That whole lives were sacrificed on the altar of public good in return for survivability of the very old, good numbers, and political and institutional reputation. I have said it before, if you ask your doctor whether any proposed action is better for yourself (or your child) PERSONALLY, given all possible benefit and risks, and he/she hesitates or looks confused... THAT is no doctor, that is an agent of the State who has forsaken the sacred duty to treat you PERSONALLY for your benefit, for your life and health... and you should find yourself a new doctor as fast as possible. You see, no matter how mundane and saccharine and academically philosophical the trolley problem seems, its purported utilitarian or arithmetical solution we now see in full. For the herd, all that really matters are the numbers, whether one arrived at it by sacrificing innocents is beside the fact... the so-called public good has nothing to do with individuals... the greatest "number" of survivors. I believe Rand solved the "trolley problem" with the idea of every person being an end in himself, which already requires no purposeful act to cause the sacrifice of anyone, much less children, who knew no better, some of whom (those so called "rare" few) died because of it. Public health is inimical to individual rights and is an evil, as evil as any of the other proposed Globalist, centrally planned erosions of our freedoms, or what is left of them. I am ashamed most prominent Objectivists are going along for the ride with not so much as a peep. The only brave and outspoken Objectivist pushing back on the madness I can think of currently, is Alex Epstein.
    3 points
  2. And that's the bottom line. Everything else follows.
    1 point
  3. ReasonFirst, Descartes thought the only reason we humans err is that we let our will outrun our understanding. He and many others thought that God could not err. That was because they thought error would be an imperfection. That is foolishness, I say. Where there is no error, there is no intelligence. God was traditionally thought of as having a will (there was the choice to make the world and to make humans) and as having understanding, or intellect. Although Descartes would emphasize the extent of the divine will, whereas Leibniz would emphasize the extent of the divine understanding, all could agree that for God, Its will cannot outrun Its understanding. Its understanding, Its intellect, may be pure act, but it is not a process requiring time to obtain knowledge. This idea of divine infallibility (and omniscience) in comparison to human fallibility (and partial ignorance) might be thought analogous to a real refrigerator and a perfect refrigerator, as in thermodynamics. The Second Law says the perfect refrigerator can be compared to real refrigerators, but no real ones can attain coincidence with the perfect one. I think that analogy would be an inappropriate analogy. Although we can get better at avoiding errors (and I would say that the best outside help on that is elementary logic texts which include informal fallacies as well as formal ones; the former can be supplemented by the informal fallacies Rand formulated, or anyway rediscovered and renamed, such as the Stolen Concept Fallacy |—>The Art of Reasoning), we would rationally expect to make errors even when proceeding with the greatest care and conformance to logic. We must not suppose it is possible to make no innocent errors, even as we get more skilled in avoiding them and even with the self-correcting methods of the hard sciences. That would be an error. For comparisons of human intelligence with other intelligence, I should suggest comparison of our cognition with the cognitive powers of the great apes, and not with imagined chimera such as God. A Natural History of Human Thinking
    1 point
×
×
  • Create New...